Protection From Spam Shouldn't Require Protection From Spam Protection

Those scamps at pogge are celebrating six years of excellence in the field of blogging with not a single Nobel Prize to show for the effort. A glaring and grievous oversight if ever there was one. In celebration of the occasion a post was posted offering an example of an email you might want to copy and forward to Minister Tony Clement and the members serving on the Industry Committee. I am scoffing the letter to repost here but by all means go and pay your respects to the gang over at pogge. Congratulations on maintainng a constant level of quality signal in the tubes of noise, many more years please.

Subject: Please don't water down Bill C-27
To: Clement.T@parl.gc.ca, ChongM@parl.gc.ca, RotaA@parl.gc.ca, BouchR@parl.gc.ca, BrownG@parl.gc.ca, Coady.S@parl.gc.ca, Garneau.M@parl.gc.ca, LakeM@parl.gc.ca, MasseB@parl.gc.ca, VankeD@parl.gc.ca, VinceR@parl.gc.ca, WallaM@parl.gc.ca, WarkeC@parl.gc.ca

Dear Honourable Members:

Bill C-27 was originally drafted to include much needed protections for consumers. These included provisions that would prevent companies from surreptitiously installing software on our computers and from retrieving personal information from those devices without our knowledge and consent. The legislation was also written to implement an express opt-in regime for commercial email which would help us to control who has access to our InBoxes and reduce the deluge of unsolicited email.

Recent media reports suggest that amendments to the legislation being proposed in committee at the behest of corporate lobby groups would weaken or even eliminate those protections. I'm writing to urge you to oppose those amendments. It's to be expected these days that corporations will treat individual Canadians as nothing more than profit centres to be managed in such a way as to maximize revenue. We rely on our elected representatives to remember that we're more than that and to protect our rights as citizens and not just as consumers.

Please stand in favour of our rights to privacy, to control what is and isn't installed on our computer systems and to secure the personal information we store on them.

Yours truly,